Quora CEO Adam D’Angelo has announced that it has raised $75 million in a new round of funding from Andreessen Horowitz (a16z). This funding round will accelerate the company’s AI chat platform, Poe.
The company expects most of the funding to pay creators of bots on the platform through the recently launched creator monetization program. Now, nearly one year after its launch, Poe has millions of users, some using the free tier and others taking advantage of premium benefits through subscriptions. Poe users create millions of bots through prompting and by developers through the API.
D’Angelo sees Poe’s role in AI as similar to the role the web browser played in accelerating progress during the development of the early internet. This shapes the company’s two goals:
1.) Be the best way for consumers to chat with various AI products.
2.) Be the easiest way for a developer to build an AI chat product and reach a mass audience. This is true whether they are creating a bot using an existing model with a prompt and any uploaded files or training a model themselves.
KEY QUOTES:
“We look forward to working closely with David George and the a16z team to accelerate the improvements we will be bringing to our users and creators, and to make AI more accessible for the average consumer.”
In the last two years, the market has changed substantially, driven by rising interest rates and higher cost of capital. This means our valuation is lower than our previous peak, but we are happy to finally be marked to this new market. We see this investment by a16z’s growth team as a statement of confidence in our team and the potential for us to grow from here.
Our focus is on what we can do with this new capital. As we launch the next phase of our creator monetization program, we expect the majority of this funding will go to developers to help make Poe a single interface for all of the most innovative new AI products. We also look forward to further accelerating our already rapid product development pace, and to creating opportunities where AI can accelerate human expert knowledge sharing through the complementarity of Poe and Quora.
The Quora product remains critical to our mission to share and grow the world’s knowledge. It continues to steadily grow — last week was our highest usage week ever — and with over 400M monthly unique visitors, we will continue to invest in Quora with the majority of our employees. That said, excluding Poe, Quora is cash flow positive, so all of this new funding will be used on Poe.
— Quora CEO Adam D’Angelo
